Ants and the hamster wheel

"I am soo busy"..."incredibly swamped this week"... "up against a deadline but I'll get back to you you.." How many times do you hear similar responses when simply greeting a friend, or inquiring about her general well-being? It seems to be a default response these days, even surpassing the almost autonomic reply "fine."

Busy-ness is so pervasive, it seems to have become the norm. But it is not particularly new. 160 years ago Henry David Thoreau observed "It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?" 

Good question, HD! Many of us still lead lives that resemble those of insects. Why? Are we really, truly, as Merriam Webster defines "busy," engaged in action: occupied? I suppose to some extent we are: we are always breathing, so are engaging in that action. But on a less cellular level, many of us keep ourselves busy, otherwise occupied, as an act of volition. This way we can shield ourselves from the tough job of examining our actions--and by extension, our life choices--too closely. We are good parents if we are busy shuttling our kids from piano to soccer. We are good citizens if we go to lots of meetings for our civic association and faith community. And we are good employees if we don't have time take a lunch hour, much less sit and actually think about how best to solve the latest work-related challenge! No wonder we have no time to do the housework, cook anything, or weed the garden.

The second part of Webster's definition of "busy" is being in use. I wonder what use we are being as we run along our self-constructed hamster wheels, making a lot of noise and engaging in action. What are we accomplishing? Are we actually getting anywhere? Essayist Tim Kreider named this state  The Busy Trap in a piece he wrote for the New York Times Opinionator blog a few months ago. I have remembered that piece, and have tried not to fall into that trap myself since I read it. But it has been a challenge! I have concluded that refusing to be "busy" is nothing less than a counter-cultural act. It is a challenge you feel viscerally, like trying to swim upstream or walk up a down escalator.

Thoreau tells us busy-ness was the norm in the 1850s, but since his time our level has increased geometrically. Just think: in the past 16 years we have gone from handheld PDAs for a few who apologized "I need this for work," to smartphones that have become lifelines for everyone over the age of 14. These devices are meant to help us organize our small tasks so we don't fall into The Busy Trap. But if we fail to master our tools, and let them master us, we are just creating different ways to engage in busy behavior. More smokescreens to hide what really matters, more reasons to escape to a superficial world where the squeaky wheel gets the oil and the underlying reasons for the squeak go unexamined until the whole thing falls apart.  

As Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living." So take time to look at your life. Look for purpose. Check to see that the road you are following actually leads somewhere. And if your wheel is squeaky, get off, oil it--and ask yourself "Do I really need to jump back on?"

Too clever by half

http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/

Right-sizing. It is something we all need to do whenever we speak publicly. It is also easier said than done.

Many of us fill up more time saying what we mean than we should. Often this is because we have failed to carefully plan what we need to say and end up just spouting what we want to say. Listeners notice. I was at an "intimate meet and greet" for a political candidate recently and noted that I was not the only one checking my watch as the second, then third, speaker went on... and on.... The crowd grew restless, but as it was mostly a group of older (baby-boomer) supporters, we were all polite and listened. Though we did shuffle. And glance longingly at the bar and buffet!

The speech was, for the most part, a list of good things this candidate had done for us. But we didn't need a laundry list or a litany. We had already been inundated with mailers -- real and electronic -- that had a sizable accumulation of facts. And if we hadn't managed to read those, we could surely visit the website. We came to "meet" the candidate because we wanted to get to "know" him: the person, not the policy. We wanted to be spoken to, not talked at. Maybe have our questions answered, or spend some time engaging with him in small group conversation. Really, the last thing you should do in front of people you want money from is bore them. The longer a speaker drones on, listing his accomplishments, the more we disengage, even if we have benefitted from those accomplishments.

This applies to all of us. When we know we will be asked to present, to speak, even to report, we need to boil our message down to its essentials. Be succinct: "short, sweet, and to the point" as one of my clients says. She should know: as a teacher she learned long ago how to engage a captive audience. Take a page from the playbook of expert artists who know when to put the paintbrush down. Listen to Konstantin Stanislavski, who told his actors at the dawn of 20th century Moscow, "Less is more." And to the 17th century Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, who ended one of his Lettres provinciales (Provincial letters) with " I would have written a shorter letter but I did not have the time."

You get my drift. 'nuff said.

Multi-tasking, or feeding our addiction?

Multi-tasking: the bane of modern existence! I have long thought successfully juggling multiple tasks simultaneously was a myth; thankfully, science disproving that myth is gaining traction. There have been reports trickling out for years debunking the effectiveness of trying to do too many things at once. My teen-aged son could probably tell you how exactly many reports on the radio and in the newspaper there have been, because I think I pointed out every one to him! I even blogged about how multi-tasking is eroding our powers of concentration, taking us farther and farther away from the Sherlockian ideal of laser-like focus that can solve impossible puzzles.

Of course, we have always been able to do some multi-tasking: ask any parent. Making dinner while supervising toddlers banging on pots and pans or pre-teens doing homework are examples that leap to mind. But there is a relatively new type of multi-tasking that involves concentrating on accomplishing a specific tasks within a specific time frame, accompanied by interruptions from one or more electronic devices. This is not only dangerous (texting while driving, anyone?) but congnitively disruptive.

Yesterday I was laughing out loud as I listened to NPR's Science Friday story on The Myth of Multitasking while making sweet and spicy walnuts. Yes, I multi-task this way, but only if the recipe is simple enough to not demand my undivided concentration. (Before the advent of podcasts and online transcripts, however, I did have a few kitchen mishaps while absorbed in radio stories!)

Dr. Clifford Naas, Professor of Communications at Stanford, and author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop was being interviewed by host Ira Flatow. Dr. Nass basically said that those who claim to be good at multi-tasking are fooling themselves:  "It's a little like smoking, you know, saying, I smoke all the time, so smoking can't be bad for me."

He said that we know the brain is remarkably elastic, and that it actually changes as we become more accustomed to this rapid switching between tasks (which is what multi-tasking really is). His research had led him to this conclusion: "People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted."

As a mom, a teacher, a coach, and a communications consultant, I can vouch for the truth of this statement. People who habitually multi-task take much longer to learn something new and to internalize it to the point where they can really use it. It takes longer for things to stick.

It will be interesting to see how generations of digital natives will deal with this concentration deficit. Many folks are enthralled with their devices to the point of addiction, according to Dr. Nass. This is not good: "We, so far, have not found people who are successful at multitasking. There are some evidence that there's a very, very, very, very small group of people who can do two tasks at one time but there's actually no evidence that anyone can do even three."

So, if you have been telling your children, colleagues, friends, to put down that smart phone so they can pay attention, only to be greeted with "I can do two things at once," you were right. Here's the proof. You're welcome

Rx: Storytelling

Like many of you this week I have been asking "what would make someone do that?" in the  aftermath of the the bombing of the Boston Marathon. Acts of terror are always scary. But even more so when we confront home-grown terrorists. We want to know: "How could they do this to us of they are of us?" But as the story of the suspects emerges, we see that though they were living in Cambridge, they were not at home there. The Tsarneav brothers seem to have felt cast adrift, disconnected from the world around them. Certainly they had no family support. And it seems, even though Dzhokhar had friends at school, the brothers weren't all that rooted in their community.

Which brought to mind a very different article I read last month in the New York Times. This article  resonated with me. Though we all experience stress in family situations, most of us cope with it in a very haphazard, ad hoc way. So I was happy to see author Bruce Feilor more closely examining the issue by asking: "What is the secret sauce that holds a family together? What are the ingredients that make some families effective, resilient, happy?" I hoped, for the sake of parents everywhere, that he had an answer we could easily implement. In a world that allows for instant connectivity, it seems to me that true connection--the kind that grounds a young person in a real community--is harder and harder to come by.

The good news is: it's not rocket science or brain surgery. The answer is a strong family narrative, a story of the generations who came before and rode the rollercoaster of life, of the family that has survived and now makes up this generation. The article sites research by psychologists Marshall Duke and Robin Fyvush of Emory University that shows kids who deal well with adversity are the ones who feel embedded in a strong family story: "Dr. Duke said that children who have the most self-confidence have what he and Dr. Fivush call a strong “intergenerational self.” They know they belong to something bigger than themselves..."

They continue to explain that even after suffering the trauma of September 11, the kids who had a strong family narrative recovered from their psychic wounds more quickly. Of course most of us know we need to communicate about problems, struggles, what we may call our "issues." But building a family story involves more that trouble-shooting or reacting to the next bad report card or phone call from the principal. To create this story you need to take the initiative and be proactive. The experts tell us "talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves. When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence."

Your children, nieces, nephews, and younger friends may resist your stories, greeting them with eye rolls and yawns, but it is important to tell them. We all have a deeply human need to be part of some group larger than ourselves. And if we have an empty space inside where that connection should be, we can easily fall prey to gangs and cults that offer to fill it. So we must make these connections by telling those stories to do our families--and our communities--a greater good.

Of courage and connection

I was speaking to a colleague yesterday about our mutual work with leaders/leadership. We were lamenting the disproportionate number of leaders who confuse possession of a large ego for that special quality of "presence." Fortunately, many of our clients do not suffer this delusion; they are not those stereotypical extrovert glad-handers. In fact, as I have written before, many good leaders dwell in that interesting space between extroversion and introversion. So the general assumption that a super-sized ego is necessary to strong leadership is (thankfully!) an idea on its way out.

Henry V: courageous and inspiring

When looking at definitions of leadership, one quality jumps out at me. It is often mentioned as if everyone knows what it means and how to cultivate it, but rarely discussed: Courage. An authentic leader, one who can inspire followers, must have courage. This is a deeply personal quality, one not possessed by all who want to lead -- especially if the desire to lead springs from a sense of entitlement. Such leaders manqué try to fool people by mimicking courage with a showy ego, or aggrandized view of self. They fall back on "fake it till you make it", applying what can be a useful technique to their inappropriate circumstances. No matter how hard they try, they will never be the leaders their egos tell them they deserve to be. They lack true courage.

But where does such courage come from? Research of social worker Brene Brown deals with the fact that the best leaders are the ones whose courage comes, counter-intuitively, through the recognition of their own vulnerability. See her excellent TED talk  for a fuller discussion of this.

Dr. Brown suggests that we must not only identify our own weakness, we must embrace it as part of the human condition. That is the only way to achieve what she calls the "whole-heartedness" that allows us to feel worthy of love, belonging, and connection. And without that sense of authentic connection, no one can be an effective leader. Look to Shakepeare's Henry V as an example of a leader who has learned this the hard way. He has grown from the wastrel Prince Hal to King Henry who rallies his troops while acknowledging their mortality. His courage and connection are intertwined and fully expressed in the eloquent St. Cripsin's Day, a.k.a "band of brothers" speech.

I tell clients who are working on their authentic leadership presence  that being willing to draw upon your whole self to communicate in this way is not for the faint of heart. But it is the best way to courageously connect. And inspire your followers.

Safety training required

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: humor is the most dangerous tool in your communications toolbox. It should not be handled by amateurs!

I just returned from a Spring Break rite of passage: college tours with my high school junior. It is not my first time at this rodeo, so quite possibly I am listening with jaded ears. But far too many of the information sessions run by adults from the admissions office, as well as tours given by students, seemed to rely on "humor" as a needless way to bond with us. No bonding is necessary when your audience is there voluntarily, and for such a short time. We all played along and dutifully chuckled at the weak jokes. There was one person out of the ten we encountered this way who wielded her humor like a pro. I suspect she had previous training in stand-up comedy, and I am sure she had practiced her "routine" several times in front of an audience. She even made one or two of the "laugh lines" we had heard before sound fresh and new. But her comedy got in the way of her information delivery. To set up a joke takes time--and timing. Even one-liners have a certain rhythm, and need to be placed just so in your patter to work. Other content gets neglected at the expense of successful humor. Afterwards, I realized that this info session had actually given fewer of the basic facts than any other.

We did not travel hundreds of miles to be be entertained. We could have gotten better comedy from dozens of venues closer to home. We wanted information, we wanted to see what differentiated one school from another, we wanted a small slice of the experience of being members of that college community (because parents are very valued--if remote--members). It should have been about us and our experience. Not about how funny the representatives of the schools were. "Mom, Dad, I want to go here because the Assistant Dean of Admissions is a mediocre comedian," said No One.

Sadly, this desire to "entertain," this need to "break the ice" and "bond" with a group instantly, in a forced, synthetic way, is not limited to college tours. I have many clients who insist on starting with a joke. "Oh yes, that always works for me!" they tell me. Because who is going to let them know after the fact that their jokes fell flat, or needlessly slowed down the momentum of their presentations? Only the coach you hire to help you. Even a trained comedian saves her jokes for the appropriate venue. She does not subject innocent bystanders to them in her day job. And if you are not trained? Here's a quote from a friend who is a comedian: "I'll make a deal with you, I won't stand up here and do your job if you won't go back to the office and do mine!"

If you want to do comedy, take a class, then find a stage. If you want to communicate, find out what your audience wants, then give it to them.